Proteases are enzymes that act on proteins by breaking them down into peptides and amino acids. A gelatinase is a type of protease that hydrolyzes gelatin into peptides and amino acids. Recently, specific gelatinases have been found to be present in elevated amounts in the wound exudates of patients with non-healing wounds, in the urine of cancer patients, in the tears of ocular rosacea patients, in the saliva of patients with periodontal disease, and in the synovial fluid of horses suffering from equine arthritis.
The current primary technique for the detection of gelatinases in a sample is gelatin zymography. Gelatin zymography is an electrophoretic technique for the detection of gelatin-hydrolytic enzymes, i.e., gelatinases. However, gelatin zymography requires laborious, skillful and time-consuming (about one week) lab work. Thus, for most hospitals, medical professionals, and other care-providing facilities, evaluation of gelatinase activity is not feasible.
Accordingly, a point-of-care gelatinase test would be an innovation in the fields of caring for wounds, cancer, ocular rosacea, periodontal disease and equine arthritis. Such a point-of-care gelatinase test may help health care providers to make informed decisions about which treatment is or is not appropriate. Advantages of guiding therapy in this way may include avoidance of unnecessary interventions, reduced nursing time, fewer clinic visits, shorter overall treatment duration, earlier recognition and prevention of complications, improved quality of life, faster healing and earlier return to work.
These potential benefits may lead regulators in the future to require such a point-of-care test before the use of specific treatments. Monitoring gelatinases through weekly testing with cheap, disposable, colorimetric tests, may allow health care providers to recognize whether care is effective and, therefore, whether the current treatment/approach is appropriate.
Lateral flow tests are simple devices intended to detect the presence of an analyte in a sample without the need for specialized and costly equipment. Typically, these tests are used for medical diagnostics either for home testing, point-of-care testing, or laboratory use. A well-known application of it is the home pregnancy test. Although commonly employing immunochromatographic techniques which take advantage of the monovalent specificity of the antibody-antigen reaction, the tests using them typically only measure one analyte, for example hCG in the case of pregnancy tests. Although tremendous efforts have been made in developing and commercializing lateral flow immunochromatographic assays for detecting a large number of analytes, minimal work has been done in adapting the lateral flow assay format for detecting enzyme activity. Thus, such a lateral flow assay format for detecting gelatinase activity that is cheap, disposable, and colorimetric-based would be an innovation.